The case that a bipartisan movement structured around driving great progress and reform may be reaching critical mass in America much like what happened in the early 20th century
I am enjoying these essays, Peter. Your historical framing makes the turbulence of modern times easier to understand and provides a compass heading for the near future.
Brilliant assessment, Peter. In Yesterday's Substack I was grappling with some of these same issues. The problems we face today had their beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s as civil society institutions began focusing more on local issues while economic forces organized and mobilized nationally and globally. Without strong support from civil society, government became dysfunctional in the face of economic aggression. We need to reconfigure these three elements of a healthy society - a balanced mix of economic, governmental, and civic institutions at all levels from the local, to the national, and the global. This is the challenge of our age.
Governments can regulate and tax and are controlled by elected officials (theoretically). Civic institutions are voluntary gatherings around a wide range of issues, activities, and initiatives. Some are local, some national or even global. Collectively they have a wide range of structures, missions, and procedures. Their influence comes from their credibility and the commitments of their members. These are the institutions where our values are formed and expressed. This is where collaboration and compassion live.
please substantiate this assertion > "The problems we face today had their beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s as civil society institutions began focusing more on local issues while economic forces organized and mobilized nationally and globally."
i mean, a ground swell of local results should be a very powerful force indeed...
and elaborate on this if you so desire
"Without strong support from civil society, government became dysfunctional in the face of economic aggression."
especially in light of the reality that:
> public university prices have risen by a factor of 20x since 1975;
> religious institutions thrive financially;
> charities have become thriving businesses;
> civil rights organizations thrive;
> think tanks thrive;
> the arts have hardly faltered;
> what other civic institutions am i leaving out...
they are all significant institutions and even "industries". how can this be, and at the same time they were over powered by government?
are you saying that their relative power was greater in 1960, 1970 than today?
just trying to understand why you think your offering is the root cause, and the solution?
You bring a fresh of breath air and hope to counteract all the gloom, doom, naysaying and dire predictions from both sides of the divide. It's good to know someone else also believes we North Americans can be more than this.
You make very valid points. I was not clear enough about the wide variety of civic institutions and their trajectories. Yes, many civil society institutions still thrive, but they were no counter to the organized take-over of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the mass media by corporations and the wealthy. Many of the civic institutions that thrive today were created by, or have become overly dependent on, or have become passive in the face of special interest corporate and billionaire funding.
The book, "Bowling Alone" described the gradual withdrawal by many people from all kinds of civic and voluntary associations. I suspect that we have also seen a dramatic decline in discretionary income in the middle and upper middle class. This discretionary income supported many civic associations in the past. I don't know of any good research on this issue. Just my hunch.
Finally, many of the "civic associations" that you mention as vital today are much more polarized and ideological than similar associations from the past. They may be civic, but many are not at all civil.
In spite of these caveats, you are so right in urging me to be more precise and support my assertions with evidence. Thanks.
I am concerned about what happened at the end of the 1920s which could very well happen again, triggering another Great Depression. The similarities are amazing, therefore my question is: WHAT would avoid another Great Depression to happen?
The Progressive Era just ran out of steam after 1920 and the roaring 20s was a return to more laissez-faire economics and some of the same issues that The Gilded Age had. I think of it more like a backlash for a decade - and that return to the old ways ended up in the 1929 financial crash and The Great Depression. The post World War II world picked up where The Progressive Era left off and that gets into my other essays.
I hope there is a place for progressive centrists. From what I have read and understood recently regarding AGI and ASI, we will have need of compromise from both our species in order for any meaningful progress to occur for the whole planet’s inhabitants.
I was trying to frame the piece as open to a broad coalition of people with different political perspectives who might have roots in both the left-of-center and right-of-center, which seems to me to include people who might identify as the center. And they might identify when pressed for an actual vote with either of the parties.
I also was trying to redefine "progressive" from its contemporary uses to what historically has been the definition. This is particularly hard for those coming from the right-of-center, since that current use is to the left and often the far left.
Yet the conference that I talked about in depth was using the core name "progress" and many who attended were libertarian and were rooted in the values of those right-of-center.
I'm not sure where you are coming from but I would guess what is now often called liberal, or the more moderate people who are generally left-of-center. This conference and movement is filled with those kind of people. And the abundance movement has many people who come from that scene.
If what I laid out is emerging, then the tent is broad. To get to substantial majorities that can change the system you need at least 55 percent and more like 60 percent of people for a generation or so.
In the past those kind of tech-positive, future-forward, change-oriented people were called progressives. I think that label might re-emerge in that classic meaning but it does not have to. It could be another word, like "liberals" was used to mean the progressives of the post-World-War II world.
I hope what most comes across in my comment is the need for compromise. I hope that compromise will be between both human to human as well as human to AGI. Although I am uncertain about the time involved, I feel AGI/ASI is coming. I hope both species will find it advantageous to work together for a better planet.
I think of it as taking one step back to go two steps forward. Get the progress you want just not all at once. Give a little to get a little more. I hope without the civil war or too human extinction.
I take exception to a few points but i would not be surprised to find you spent more time on this essay than all the others combined. You chose your words very carefully - a bit of passive language... Did some significant research. Spent time ticking and tying threads from start to finish.
Well done.
My critiques:
1. ) my great grand parents settled in texas and mississippi in the late 1800's. yes, they were common folk... yes, they were poor... yes, so were their neighbors, but they did not live in "squalor"... i have a hard time believing "the vast majority" lived in a state of "squalor".
2.) i'm guessing you attempted to tamp down your adjectives when referring to trump, but it seems to me that you were either overly harsh in re to him, or you were overly kind in re the leaders of the opposition which in my view are just as devious and dangerous but present a better facade...
3.) future forward - yes. that should include letting go of 1920 economic thinking - specifically "keynesian economics" which dominates the thoughts of modern leaders but especially the thoughts of the DNC...
4.) a really new world - the US needs to take care of the US first. always. because the rest of the world will take the US and its people down if we don't. it is human nature response to geopolitical forces. the US has paid a heavy price militarily (human loss) and in economic terms in support of globalization. it is time for the US to reorient, but with our interests as the top priority. being nice to china and middle east autocrats will not make the world a better place or secure the interests of the US. i agree that we can strike a balance with China, just like we did with the USSR. i also see much evidence that China has already begun to decline much like the USSR circa 1980...
5. state capacity - when people talk about AI and governing i find them vague. i'm not sure what they mean, and i don't think they know what they mean. ALL HUMAN DECISIONS ARE EMOTIONAL. This is human nature and economics 101 (forget Marx, forget Keynes, read Austrian economics).
Adding AI to the mix to enable "data based decision making" is dependent upon the training data used, the views of the trainers, and the capacity to train. Almost all data is dirty (needs to be cleaned in some way because of bias and availability). Facts are typically subjective. There will always be politics (differing thoughts) about the data used, the trainer's biases, and the results (the emotional aspect of human decisioning). CAUTION.
6. climate change - what's up with the snide remarks about texans and billionaires? you undo yourself and your ambitions with such slights... the DNC has played the "oppressed and oppressors" game to the detriment of the nation, creating villains (billionaires and oil companies) to get votes (ala castro, lenin, and all the others that advertised a utopian society). the leaders that will take us forward will need to be more judicious when addressing their antagonists. let others cast aspersions... and let them roll off your back like water off a duck... free unsolicited advice.
i might be willing to be an editor if you are interested... at the least you would get a different bias before publishing...
okay, that may seem like a lot of push back from me, but in context of this long, complex essay i think they are minor challenges (except maybe 'state capacity' and 'climate change').
excellent essay: well thought out, good research, good analogies, good flow, thorough at this stage of the process...
A thoughtful comment, as usual. I always read your feedback and consider it. I did wrestle with some of the things like you pointe out.
The squalor comment really had more to do with the urban tenements and I did think about how that might not have been the case in the rural areas. There's always tradeoffs in writing between brevity to make the point and depth to nail the nuance of reality. That's one that I did not think needed too much depth, but I did struggle with it.
Also, you probably don't know this but I do have an editor from Big Think (which syndicates all of these) who goes over every one of these essays with a very fine-tooth comb and so some things end up as a back and forth between us.
The Texas oil billionaire mention might have been a bit snarky but I do believe that big oil did a lot to distort the reality of climate change and heavily influence politics to suit their interests. Everyone talks about big tech and the influence on politics but big oil has been in that game for a lot longer.
Our elites during the gilded age had SOME contact with death, war, poverty, crime. They had a religiously informed worldview, a natural patriotism, and an understanding of human incentives and good/evil and the concept of virtue, etc.
Our elites now are so thoroughly disconnected from the lives and problems of the country that they will, if asked, completely fail to describe them. They’re constantly being taken in by engineered moral panics (BLM, climate CRISIS, #MeToo, trans genocide, white supremacy) while they refuse to deal with actual systemic social problems (crime, immigration explosion, educational decline, family disintegration). And even the problems they become enamored of have a whiff of falsity - it’s all part of the simulacrum. We KNOW this because they don’t actually DO anything to address their “crises” (other than post on social media).
So we have wave after wave of elite political hysteria with no productive outcome, and that’s because we have an elite class devoted to the ideas of equality, access, and inclusivity… who never do the two things that marginalized people actually want: fix the broken systems (this is hard, and it would lose elites political power) or share some of their own wealth and status (which only very rarely happens, for token beneficiaries). Our elites in 1900 were a flawed but capable leadership class. Our elites now are parasites, using political belief and display to assuage their guilt and their gnawing sense of inauthenticity.
Very interesting read. Enjoy reading your series on AI. Please forgive me, I can’t help myself, where’s the outrage over the carbon emissions required to commercialize AI? I mean really, they wanted to kill all the cows for goodness sake.
I agree completely that we are entering a new era of tremendous potential created by breakthrough GPTs and that we will need new institutions to deal with them.
My concern with this essay is that it seems to rely more on selective rhetoric than empirical facts or trends (perhaps these are in the book version?) For example, in comparing two eras, you describe the first as run by despised “robber barons” creating a world of biased newspapers, puppet governments, financial crises, unemployment, resentment and inequality. The second era, you describe as run by “Progressive A Listers” leading to equality and national parks, and better democracy.
Someone else could describe the first era as one of entrepreneurial brilliance leading to the creation of modern era of energy, transportation and manufacturing and unprecedented prosperity. This was followed by the era of technocratic busy bodies undermining free enterprise and leading us into the high tax, bureaucratic era of two world wars, communism, fascism and a global depression of unprecedented misery.
I am not arguing that one rhetorical description is right and one wrong. I am arguing that both replace substantive cause and effect empirical reviews with (what Tyler Cohen would refer to as) mood affiliation arguments.
Although it is true that later eras tended to build upon earlier ones, they didn’t just solve problems and excesses, they also created new problems and excesses of their own. Some things and some institutions got better, and some got worse. Calling one era the “progressive” one tends to obscure this view.
Perhaps another way of stating my argument is that the people who gave us two world wars, the Great Depression, communism and fascism probably considered themselves progressive A listers too. We have the gift of historic perspective to help us separate those who were right from those who were disastrously wrong. We need to be alert to the possibility that we could be either (or both?) Lenin or Roosevelt.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments too. Let me be clear about one thing you raised. I am very pro-entrepreneur, and give the entrepreneurs from the late 19th century much credit for bringing to scale the general-purpose technologies of their time like railroads and the beginnings of electricity.
And the same for our era. I have been in the middle of Silicon Valley for the last 30 years and frequently have defended the tech world from naysayers and doomers, from the early internet through to AI now.
However, I do think that in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and in the last 10 years or so of our current era, those entrepreneurial tech titans have overreached and are creating a backlash.
They could have in the old days and could today course-correct on their own, but in both cases it seems outside forces need to do some of that course-correction that spreads the wealth better, ensures power is less centralized, and looks out for the interests of everyone.
The so-called Robber Barons really did go off the rails back in the day and created the backlash of elites outside those industries that did get Americans through that juncture. And it looks like something similar seems to be happening in America today.
Thank you for responding. And to be clear I am 90% agreeing. But the 10% is probably important…
The heart of our differences seems to be that I am really nervous that the Progressive A Listers will indeed (or ever did) make things better on average. I think there was a high likelihood that it was these very “progressive era” A Listers who destroyed Germany, Japan, China and Russia, and led the rest of us to two world wars, genocide and the worst and longest lasting recession ever.
We neutered the titans of industry and got the scariest and most horrific half century imaginable. Was it worth it? Seems arguable that the cure was several orders of magnitude worse than the disease.
Peter's comments seem US-centric to me (not a criticism, i don't want to fix the world's problems, mine are enough).
what i get from Peter's essays is that circa 1920, the world was caught in a convergence of major forces (technology, economics, demographics, and geopolitical). the world was about to become more complex. some nations lost advantages, some gained advantages. risks and issues changed. in response:
> the US, led by FDR, expanded governing/regulation and realigned industries/commerce
> while major empires (UK, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Turkey) were doing the same
as a byproduct of those many forces converging, and various national responses, we had
> 2 world wars (not caused by the US),
> depression (not caused by a generation but by a convergence of many forces),
> communism (rose out of Europe - their version of governing progression),
> fascism (rose out of Europe due to UK/French suppression of Germany post ww1)
which all happened in 2 or 3 decades...
but i get your point
it seems to me Peter is using "progressive era" to note the world is once again poised for significant change, leading to more complexity that will drive changes in governing, economics, demographics, and technology (communications, health, power, agriculture, etc) and it will essentially happen in 2 or 3 decades...
Thanks! I firmly agree with your concluding paragraphs. I do worry about self appointed elites having excessive faith in their ability to improve the world.
I am enjoying these essays, Peter. Your historical framing makes the turbulence of modern times easier to understand and provides a compass heading for the near future.
i agree with you. of course, one can find hundreds of similar recaps that consider different events and facts and promote different outcomes...
Brilliant assessment, Peter. In Yesterday's Substack I was grappling with some of these same issues. The problems we face today had their beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s as civil society institutions began focusing more on local issues while economic forces organized and mobilized nationally and globally. Without strong support from civil society, government became dysfunctional in the face of economic aggression. We need to reconfigure these three elements of a healthy society - a balanced mix of economic, governmental, and civic institutions at all levels from the local, to the national, and the global. This is the challenge of our age.
I saw that piece, but link to it here in case people want to read it.
how is "civic institutions" different from "governmental"?
Governments can regulate and tax and are controlled by elected officials (theoretically). Civic institutions are voluntary gatherings around a wide range of issues, activities, and initiatives. Some are local, some national or even global. Collectively they have a wide range of structures, missions, and procedures. Their influence comes from their credibility and the commitments of their members. These are the institutions where our values are formed and expressed. This is where collaboration and compassion live.
got it.
please substantiate this assertion > "The problems we face today had their beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s as civil society institutions began focusing more on local issues while economic forces organized and mobilized nationally and globally."
i mean, a ground swell of local results should be a very powerful force indeed...
and elaborate on this if you so desire
"Without strong support from civil society, government became dysfunctional in the face of economic aggression."
especially in light of the reality that:
> public university prices have risen by a factor of 20x since 1975;
> religious institutions thrive financially;
> charities have become thriving businesses;
> civil rights organizations thrive;
> think tanks thrive;
> the arts have hardly faltered;
> what other civic institutions am i leaving out...
they are all significant institutions and even "industries". how can this be, and at the same time they were over powered by government?
are you saying that their relative power was greater in 1960, 1970 than today?
just trying to understand why you think your offering is the root cause, and the solution?
You bring a fresh of breath air and hope to counteract all the gloom, doom, naysaying and dire predictions from both sides of the divide. It's good to know someone else also believes we North Americans can be more than this.
Arthur,
You make very valid points. I was not clear enough about the wide variety of civic institutions and their trajectories. Yes, many civil society institutions still thrive, but they were no counter to the organized take-over of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the mass media by corporations and the wealthy. Many of the civic institutions that thrive today were created by, or have become overly dependent on, or have become passive in the face of special interest corporate and billionaire funding.
The book, "Bowling Alone" described the gradual withdrawal by many people from all kinds of civic and voluntary associations. I suspect that we have also seen a dramatic decline in discretionary income in the middle and upper middle class. This discretionary income supported many civic associations in the past. I don't know of any good research on this issue. Just my hunch.
Finally, many of the "civic associations" that you mention as vital today are much more polarized and ideological than similar associations from the past. They may be civic, but many are not at all civil.
In spite of these caveats, you are so right in urging me to be more precise and support my assertions with evidence. Thanks.
Dan
we agree on much
I am concerned about what happened at the end of the 1920s which could very well happen again, triggering another Great Depression. The similarities are amazing, therefore my question is: WHAT would avoid another Great Depression to happen?
The Progressive Era just ran out of steam after 1920 and the roaring 20s was a return to more laissez-faire economics and some of the same issues that The Gilded Age had. I think of it more like a backlash for a decade - and that return to the old ways ended up in the 1929 financial crash and The Great Depression. The post World War II world picked up where The Progressive Era left off and that gets into my other essays.
what similarities do you see?
i see some as well, off the cuff:
1. a populace lacking skills/knowledge needed in a new economic era (statistics, IT)
2. a sudden increase in national/societal complexity (demographics, economics, technology)
3. a federal system that is complex but not aligned with the new complexities
4. an older generation governing that is misaligned with views of upcoming generations
5. social movements supporting socialism/communism
I hope there is a place for progressive centrists. From what I have read and understood recently regarding AGI and ASI, we will have need of compromise from both our species in order for any meaningful progress to occur for the whole planet’s inhabitants.
I was trying to frame the piece as open to a broad coalition of people with different political perspectives who might have roots in both the left-of-center and right-of-center, which seems to me to include people who might identify as the center. And they might identify when pressed for an actual vote with either of the parties.
I also was trying to redefine "progressive" from its contemporary uses to what historically has been the definition. This is particularly hard for those coming from the right-of-center, since that current use is to the left and often the far left.
Yet the conference that I talked about in depth was using the core name "progress" and many who attended were libertarian and were rooted in the values of those right-of-center.
I'm not sure where you are coming from but I would guess what is now often called liberal, or the more moderate people who are generally left-of-center. This conference and movement is filled with those kind of people. And the abundance movement has many people who come from that scene.
If what I laid out is emerging, then the tent is broad. To get to substantial majorities that can change the system you need at least 55 percent and more like 60 percent of people for a generation or so.
In the past those kind of tech-positive, future-forward, change-oriented people were called progressives. I think that label might re-emerge in that classic meaning but it does not have to. It could be another word, like "liberals" was used to mean the progressives of the post-World-War II world.
I hope what most comes across in my comment is the need for compromise. I hope that compromise will be between both human to human as well as human to AGI. Although I am uncertain about the time involved, I feel AGI/ASI is coming. I hope both species will find it advantageous to work together for a better planet.
what is a "progessive centrist"? is that a "liberal" ala the founding fathers?
I think of it as taking one step back to go two steps forward. Get the progress you want just not all at once. Give a little to get a little more. I hope without the civil war or too human extinction.
Link here to previous comment.
https://open.substack.com/pub/politicsandgov/p/the-promise-and-the-perils-of-local?r=cx8q&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
What an essay!!
I take exception to a few points but i would not be surprised to find you spent more time on this essay than all the others combined. You chose your words very carefully - a bit of passive language... Did some significant research. Spent time ticking and tying threads from start to finish.
Well done.
My critiques:
1. ) my great grand parents settled in texas and mississippi in the late 1800's. yes, they were common folk... yes, they were poor... yes, so were their neighbors, but they did not live in "squalor"... i have a hard time believing "the vast majority" lived in a state of "squalor".
2.) i'm guessing you attempted to tamp down your adjectives when referring to trump, but it seems to me that you were either overly harsh in re to him, or you were overly kind in re the leaders of the opposition which in my view are just as devious and dangerous but present a better facade...
3.) future forward - yes. that should include letting go of 1920 economic thinking - specifically "keynesian economics" which dominates the thoughts of modern leaders but especially the thoughts of the DNC...
4.) a really new world - the US needs to take care of the US first. always. because the rest of the world will take the US and its people down if we don't. it is human nature response to geopolitical forces. the US has paid a heavy price militarily (human loss) and in economic terms in support of globalization. it is time for the US to reorient, but with our interests as the top priority. being nice to china and middle east autocrats will not make the world a better place or secure the interests of the US. i agree that we can strike a balance with China, just like we did with the USSR. i also see much evidence that China has already begun to decline much like the USSR circa 1980...
5. state capacity - when people talk about AI and governing i find them vague. i'm not sure what they mean, and i don't think they know what they mean. ALL HUMAN DECISIONS ARE EMOTIONAL. This is human nature and economics 101 (forget Marx, forget Keynes, read Austrian economics).
Adding AI to the mix to enable "data based decision making" is dependent upon the training data used, the views of the trainers, and the capacity to train. Almost all data is dirty (needs to be cleaned in some way because of bias and availability). Facts are typically subjective. There will always be politics (differing thoughts) about the data used, the trainer's biases, and the results (the emotional aspect of human decisioning). CAUTION.
6. climate change - what's up with the snide remarks about texans and billionaires? you undo yourself and your ambitions with such slights... the DNC has played the "oppressed and oppressors" game to the detriment of the nation, creating villains (billionaires and oil companies) to get votes (ala castro, lenin, and all the others that advertised a utopian society). the leaders that will take us forward will need to be more judicious when addressing their antagonists. let others cast aspersions... and let them roll off your back like water off a duck... free unsolicited advice.
i might be willing to be an editor if you are interested... at the least you would get a different bias before publishing...
okay, that may seem like a lot of push back from me, but in context of this long, complex essay i think they are minor challenges (except maybe 'state capacity' and 'climate change').
excellent essay: well thought out, good research, good analogies, good flow, thorough at this stage of the process...
A thoughtful comment, as usual. I always read your feedback and consider it. I did wrestle with some of the things like you pointe out.
The squalor comment really had more to do with the urban tenements and I did think about how that might not have been the case in the rural areas. There's always tradeoffs in writing between brevity to make the point and depth to nail the nuance of reality. That's one that I did not think needed too much depth, but I did struggle with it.
Also, you probably don't know this but I do have an editor from Big Think (which syndicates all of these) who goes over every one of these essays with a very fine-tooth comb and so some things end up as a back and forth between us.
The Texas oil billionaire mention might have been a bit snarky but I do believe that big oil did a lot to distort the reality of climate change and heavily influence politics to suit their interests. Everyone talks about big tech and the influence on politics but big oil has been in that game for a lot longer.
Our elites during the gilded age had SOME contact with death, war, poverty, crime. They had a religiously informed worldview, a natural patriotism, and an understanding of human incentives and good/evil and the concept of virtue, etc.
Our elites now are so thoroughly disconnected from the lives and problems of the country that they will, if asked, completely fail to describe them. They’re constantly being taken in by engineered moral panics (BLM, climate CRISIS, #MeToo, trans genocide, white supremacy) while they refuse to deal with actual systemic social problems (crime, immigration explosion, educational decline, family disintegration). And even the problems they become enamored of have a whiff of falsity - it’s all part of the simulacrum. We KNOW this because they don’t actually DO anything to address their “crises” (other than post on social media).
So we have wave after wave of elite political hysteria with no productive outcome, and that’s because we have an elite class devoted to the ideas of equality, access, and inclusivity… who never do the two things that marginalized people actually want: fix the broken systems (this is hard, and it would lose elites political power) or share some of their own wealth and status (which only very rarely happens, for token beneficiaries). Our elites in 1900 were a flawed but capable leadership class. Our elites now are parasites, using political belief and display to assuage their guilt and their gnawing sense of inauthenticity.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/oppressors
Very interesting read. Enjoy reading your series on AI. Please forgive me, I can’t help myself, where’s the outrage over the carbon emissions required to commercialize AI? I mean really, they wanted to kill all the cows for goodness sake.
I agree completely that we are entering a new era of tremendous potential created by breakthrough GPTs and that we will need new institutions to deal with them.
My concern with this essay is that it seems to rely more on selective rhetoric than empirical facts or trends (perhaps these are in the book version?) For example, in comparing two eras, you describe the first as run by despised “robber barons” creating a world of biased newspapers, puppet governments, financial crises, unemployment, resentment and inequality. The second era, you describe as run by “Progressive A Listers” leading to equality and national parks, and better democracy.
Someone else could describe the first era as one of entrepreneurial brilliance leading to the creation of modern era of energy, transportation and manufacturing and unprecedented prosperity. This was followed by the era of technocratic busy bodies undermining free enterprise and leading us into the high tax, bureaucratic era of two world wars, communism, fascism and a global depression of unprecedented misery.
I am not arguing that one rhetorical description is right and one wrong. I am arguing that both replace substantive cause and effect empirical reviews with (what Tyler Cohen would refer to as) mood affiliation arguments.
Although it is true that later eras tended to build upon earlier ones, they didn’t just solve problems and excesses, they also created new problems and excesses of their own. Some things and some institutions got better, and some got worse. Calling one era the “progressive” one tends to obscure this view.
Perhaps another way of stating my argument is that the people who gave us two world wars, the Great Depression, communism and fascism probably considered themselves progressive A listers too. We have the gift of historic perspective to help us separate those who were right from those who were disastrously wrong. We need to be alert to the possibility that we could be either (or both?) Lenin or Roosevelt.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments too. Let me be clear about one thing you raised. I am very pro-entrepreneur, and give the entrepreneurs from the late 19th century much credit for bringing to scale the general-purpose technologies of their time like railroads and the beginnings of electricity.
And the same for our era. I have been in the middle of Silicon Valley for the last 30 years and frequently have defended the tech world from naysayers and doomers, from the early internet through to AI now.
However, I do think that in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and in the last 10 years or so of our current era, those entrepreneurial tech titans have overreached and are creating a backlash.
They could have in the old days and could today course-correct on their own, but in both cases it seems outside forces need to do some of that course-correction that spreads the wealth better, ensures power is less centralized, and looks out for the interests of everyone.
The so-called Robber Barons really did go off the rails back in the day and created the backlash of elites outside those industries that did get Americans through that juncture. And it looks like something similar seems to be happening in America today.
Thank you for responding. And to be clear I am 90% agreeing. But the 10% is probably important…
The heart of our differences seems to be that I am really nervous that the Progressive A Listers will indeed (or ever did) make things better on average. I think there was a high likelihood that it was these very “progressive era” A Listers who destroyed Germany, Japan, China and Russia, and led the rest of us to two world wars, genocide and the worst and longest lasting recession ever.
We neutered the titans of industry and got the scariest and most horrific half century imaginable. Was it worth it? Seems arguable that the cure was several orders of magnitude worse than the disease.
Peter's comments seem US-centric to me (not a criticism, i don't want to fix the world's problems, mine are enough).
what i get from Peter's essays is that circa 1920, the world was caught in a convergence of major forces (technology, economics, demographics, and geopolitical). the world was about to become more complex. some nations lost advantages, some gained advantages. risks and issues changed. in response:
> the US, led by FDR, expanded governing/regulation and realigned industries/commerce
> while major empires (UK, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Turkey) were doing the same
as a byproduct of those many forces converging, and various national responses, we had
> 2 world wars (not caused by the US),
> depression (not caused by a generation but by a convergence of many forces),
> communism (rose out of Europe - their version of governing progression),
> fascism (rose out of Europe due to UK/French suppression of Germany post ww1)
which all happened in 2 or 3 decades...
but i get your point
it seems to me Peter is using "progressive era" to note the world is once again poised for significant change, leading to more complexity that will drive changes in governing, economics, demographics, and technology (communications, health, power, agriculture, etc) and it will essentially happen in 2 or 3 decades...
Thanks! I firmly agree with your concluding paragraphs. I do worry about self appointed elites having excessive faith in their ability to improve the world.